Russian hackers are taking advantage of the information on a zero day Windows flaw that Google gave them to hack western machines.

Google gave Microsoft just six days to fix the flaw, despite giving Apple six months to fix an equally dangerous bug. Microsoft could not patch the flaw in time and now it seems that the same Russian hacking team behind political hacks are using it.

Vole said that there had been several attacks using "spear phishing" emails from a hacking group known Strontium, which is more widely known as "Fancy Bear," or APT 28. Russian hackers have been accused of gaming the US election in favour of Donald Trump.

Microsoft said a patch to protect Windows users against the newly discovered threat will be released on 8 November.

A US intelligence expert on Russian cyber activity said that Fancy Bear primarily works for or on behalf of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, which US intelligence officials have concluded were responsible for hacks of Democratic Party databases and emails.

Microsoft said the attacks exploited a vulnerability in Adobe Systems Flash software and one in the Windows operating system.

Adobe released a patch for that vulnerability on Monday, when security researchers with Google went public with details on the attack.

Google insists that it is following its standing policy of going public seven days after discovering "critical vulnerabilities" that are being actively exploited by hackers. That of course does not apply to Apple which was allowed by Google to run a serious zero-day flaw for six months. It also ignores the fact that Google itself could not fix and issue a zero-day flaw in its own operating system Android in seven days. If we were Microsoft we would knock this policy on the head by finding similar flaws in Android for a laugh and give Google seven days to fix them and push the update to users phones.

Remember the days when Wikileaks did decent work and provided a valid channel for whistleblowers? Well it looks like those days have long gone and the outfit has become a tool of Tsar Putin’s propaganda machine.

In the good-old days, Wikileaks actually was impartial and careful. Sure it tended to expose US atrocities but that was because there were more of them.

But now there is mounting evidence that the Russian government is supplying WikiLeaks with hacked emails as part of a plan to game the US election and put an oligarch friendly candidate into the White House.

While the allegations are coming from the Clinton campaign they are also being made by security companies and government officials.

One US official told CNN that the methods of the disclosures suggest Moscow is at least providing the information or is possibly directly responsible for the leaks. US intelligence officials are still investigating the degree of connection between Russia and WikiLeaks but they remain confident that Russia is behind the leaks themselves.

The Director of National Intelligence, which represents 19 US intelligence agencies including the Department of Homeland Security leveled unambiguous charges against Russia.

Meanwhile Wikileaks, or the Russians have been tipping off the Trump campaign. Roger Stone, a long-time adviser to Republican nominee Donald Trump, clearly had advance knowledge of the recent hack and publication of his emails on WikiLeaks. Of course he denied it.

Trump has called on Moscow to hack into Clinton's computers, downplayed criticism of Putin's authoritarian tendencies, tried to suggest that Russia hasn't hacked US systems and promoted foreign policy positions that jibe more closely with Moscow's than Washington's. He's relied on aides with ties to Russia and most recently, quoted and fake Russian news reports to raise questions about Clinton.

But in accepting the Russian emails, Assange has placed his organisation in a tricky place. Some of the emails are damaging to Clinton and should be looked at, but because the source is Russia, we cannot be certain if the emails are edited, taken out of context or even forged.

We are certain that a hack of the Republican servers would reveal similar emails, and if the Trump campaign server was turned over it would produce some pure comedy gold. Had WikiLeaks provided these, it would be seen as an effective tool for public information and there would have been no complaints.

Yet the fact that Assange has been unable to source this sort of material means that the Russians are not give it to him or would cut off his headline-grabbing Clinton emails gravy train. Assange might not care; he has made it pretty clear that he regards Clinton as responsible for him being locked up in the embassy – something which is his own fault. However, as a long-term policy decision that hamstrings Wikileaks and weakens the information that is presented on the site. It makes him entirely dependent on state run spying operations and propaganda efforts.

The Russians failed last week to deliver the goods on Clinton and had to publish it themselves. The information was pure Putin propaganda. At least Assange had the good sense not to release that. But it is increasingly difficult to tell what is true and what is not on WikiLeaks.

Wikileaks was supposed to deliver the smoking gun which would finish off Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign on Tuesday, but it looks like Tsar Putin’s hackers did not actually have the goods.

Wikileaks' Julian Assange must have looked at the material which Guccifer 2.0 provided and realised that he was being played. Everyone in the security business knows that Guccifer 2.0 is actually a group tied to Tsar Putin’s disinformation unit, but that did not mean that the material he had was not the real deal.

Assange was initially telling the world that the data would finish off Clinton's campaign for good, a fact which was echoed by the US republican candidate, and friend of Putin, Donald Trump.

But it is fairly clear that Assange, and the Trump campaign expected the material to be far better than it was. When Assange did not play ball, Guccifer 2.0 posted what he claimed were files from the Clinton Foundation's servers and it turned out to be rubbish. Guccifer 2.0 wrote:

"Many of you have been waiting for this, some even asked me to do it. So, this is the moment. I hacked the Clinton Foundation server and downloaded hundreds of thousands of docs and donors' databases. Hillary Clinton and her staff don't even bother about the information security. It was just a matter of time to gain access to the Clinton Foundation server."

But the files did not come from the Clinton Foundation. Some of the individual files contain real data, much of it came from other breaches Guccifer 2.0 has claimed credit for at the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Other data could have been aggregated from public information, while some clearly appears to be fabricated as propaganda.

Some files have been scrubbed of the "custom properties" fields that tell things like the version of Office applications that were used to create them so it appears that Putin’s disinformation team were hoping that Assange would do what he normally did and publish them without looking.

Aside from some DNC payroll data, and lease documents for some Democratic Party field offices, most of the documents in the dump were originally authored either at the DCCC or by people working for the DCCC on their personal computers. The file timestamps correspond to the timeframe of the DNC and DCCC data breaches, with nothing more recent than July of this year.

The Clinton Foundation's president, former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, denied that the foundation had been hacked in a Twitter post:

“Guccifer's post includes a screen grab of what appears to directory folders, including one labeled "Pay to Play," that appears to be fabricated from DCCC and DNC files and other material of questionable provenance. But some of the material appears to be actual data from the DCCC.”

Tsar Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is ordering a purge of all things Microsoft from the glorious Russias.

Tsar Putin’s plan is to replace Microsoft software with Russian software on computers as a part of a plan to remove foreign tech. Artem Yermolaev, head of technology for Moscow, said the city will replace Microsoft's Exchange Server and Outlook on a total of 6,000 computers with an email system installed by Rostelecom PJSC, a state-run carrier.

The new email software, developed by Russia's New Cloud Technologies, might then be deployed on 600,000 computers and servers.

Microsoft's Windows and Office will be the next to go, Yermolaev added. Putin is apparently worried about security concerns after US companies shut down paid services in Crimea, following Russia's annexation on 18 March 2014.

Voleware is not the only thing that has to worry. SAP and Oracle are also on the Russian purge list.

German Klimenko, Putin's internet czar, wants to increase taxes on US tech firms in an effort to help Russian rivals such as Yandex NV and mail.ru.

Russian Communications Minister Nikolay Nikiforov said, "We want the money of taxpayers and state-run firms to be primarily spent on local software."

They have a year to get their act together. From next year, government organisations including the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service, General Prosecutor's Office and Audit Chamber "will be tightening their grip" on state institutions that are not using domestic software, he added.

Moscow has already switched from Cisco Systems for city surveillance cameras to local software, said Yermolaev. At least this way, they can be sure that they discretely don’t work when an anti-Putin journalist mysteriously shoots themselves several times in front of one of them.

Tsar Vladimir Putin has denied that his elite team of hackers were behind the hack of the Democratic Party, but does say who ever did it was carrying out a public service.

Putin is backing Donald Trump for US President. Trump owes him and his oligarch mates a fair bit of dosh and he thinks that it would be rather nice to have someone who owes him a few favours in the White House.

When the democrats were hacked, the West blamed him, however a month later he said the Russians didn’t do it.

In an interview with Bloomberg, the Russian leader said: “Listen, does it even matter who hacked this data? The important thing is the content that was given to the public.’’

Fair enough, Tsar Putin loves it when his opposition groups get information he does not like out to the press.

He added, “There’s no need to distract the public’s attention from the essence of the problem by raising some minor issues connected with the search for who did it. But I want to tell you again, I don’t know anything about it, and on a state level Russia has never done this.”

In June, The Washington Post reported that the culprits were able to burrow into the DNC’s network and read its email and chat histories. It is believed that the DNC was just one of many U.S. political organizations targeted by the hackers. The Russian embassy has denied any knowledge of the attacks.

In its own blog , CrowdStrike explained that it has identified two groups or operations that were possibly responsible for the cyberattacks on the DNC, dubbed Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear. The former is alleged to have infiltrated the unclassified networks of the White House, State Department, and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff in the past, as well as companies in several industries and critical infrastructure networks.

Fancy Bear, on the other hand, is thought to be a separate Russian hacker operation that has also allegedly carried out attacks on foreign governments and media organizations. It has been linked to the cyberattacks last year on Germany’s Bundestag and France’s TV5 Monde TV station.

CrowdStrike CTO Dmitri Alperovitch wrote that his firm “considers them some of the best adversaries out of all the numerous nation-state, criminal, and hacktivist/terrorist groups we encounter on a daily basis.”

A Russian athlete who blew the whistle on Russian attempts to hide its wide scale doping of athletes says she is on the run from Tsar Putin’s hackers.

Yulia Stepanova said she fears for her life and has been forced to move after hackers tried to find her location.

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) confirmed that its online doping management account had been illegally accessed. Stepanova said she had moved her family to another location after the hack.Stepanova said that the only reason somebody would hack an ADAMS account is to find out your exact location.

"We decided it was safer to relocate If something happens to us then you should know that it is not an accident."

Stepanova angered Tsar Putin when her whistleblowing cost more than 100 Russians their place at the Rio Games. She has been in hiding in the United States with her husband Vitaly, a former Russian anti-doping official, after giving evidence that the Russian government for years facilitated widespread cheating across nearly all Olympic sports.

All athletes have to enter their details into WADA's Anti-Doping Administration and Management System (ADAMS) and register a time and location each day where they can be reached by doping testers for an out of competition test.

Vitaly Stepanov said he did not know who had hacked his wife's account but said the couple were being watched by Russian authorities.

Tsar Putin’s hacking team is part of his propaganda operation. It has had many successes including breaking into the Democratic Party servers to help fragment Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Putin is a friend of Donald Trump and his wife goes on holiday with Trump’s daughter. His Oligarch friends also have given a considerable of cash to Trump’s businesses.People who have angered Putin before have been given a nice cup of radioactive tea to have with their biscuits.

Fruity cargo cult Apple's arrogant attitude to its business partners might have earned it a price fixing court case in Tsar Putin's Russia.

The Federal Antimonopoly Service of Russia said that it has opened investigations into the allegations after a claim from a citizen that identical prices had been set for iPhone 6s and 6s Plus models at 16 major retailers.

Resellers had quoted identical prices and maitinaed them for a certain period of time, the anti-monopoly body said. A similar practice has been followed for other iPhone models as well. MTS has been mentioned as one of the resellers in the anti-monopoly service's statement. Another firm Euroset has denied having coordinated prices with other resellers.

"The Anti-Monopoly Service sees signs of price fixing violations in the Russian Federation at Apple iPhone resellers, which resulted in the same prices for these smartphones," the agency said in a statement issued to Reuters.

9to5Mac claims that Apple might have hacked off its partners with its autocratic control over its Russian partners. In 2012 MTS accused Apple of running a "dictatorship" over iPhone sales.

"They're more in a dictatorship mode where they say, 'This is what you have to do or you don't get the iPhone'. Being arrogant with your partners in big markets doesn't pay off," said MTS vice president of marketing Vasyl Latsanych.

But associating Apple with antitrust is not a Russian thing. In fact Apple has form for this sort of thing in the US. In 2013 the US District Judge Denise Cote in Manhattan found compelling evidence against Apple for violating federal antitrust laws by conspiring with publishers to eliminate retail price and raise e-book prices. Apple traditionally denies it has done anything wrong sometimes even after the highest court in the land tells them that they have been very very naughty indeed..

9to5Mac claims that Apple might have hacked off its partners with its autocratic control over its Russian partners. In 2012 MTS accused Apple of running a "dictatorship" over iPhone sales.

"They're more in a dictatorship mode where they say, 'This is what you have to do or you don't get the iPhone'. Being arrogant with your partners in big markets doesn't pay off," said MTS vice president of marketing Vasyl Latsanych.

Apple does not traditionally sell many iPhones in Russia. They are popular among the Russian mafia types who are among the few who can afford them. Of course they don't buy pink ones.

NSA hackers are targeting Russian government-linked hacking teams to see if they're responsible for the massive breach at the Democratic National Committee.

Analysts claim that Tsar Putin’s hacker teams have been active in trying to get Donald Trump elected by hacking sites to gather mud for him to fling against the democrats. Trump owes a lot of money to Russian oligarchs, who are Putin’s chums, who he went to after the American banks told him to go forth and multiply.

Robert Joyce, chief of the NSA's Tailored Access Operations said the NSA has technical capabilities and legal authorities that allow the agency to "hack back" suspected hacking groups, infiltrating their systems to gather intelligence about their operations in the wake of a cyber-attack.

"In terms of the foreign intelligence mission, one of the things we have to do is try to understand who did a breach, who is responsible for a breach. So we will use the NSA's authorities to pursue foreign intelligence to try to get back into that collection, to understand who did it and get the attribution. That's hard work, but that's one of the responsibilities we have," Joyce said.

The NSA is rumored to be using its own hackers to infiltrate two Russian hacking teams that the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike alleged broke into the DNC's system and were linked to two separate Russian intelligence agencies. NSA hackers apparently watched the attacks from the inside as the hackers conduct their operations in real time.

One of the weaknesses of Russia’s hacker teams is that they have been using the same gear for other things. While US officials have been telling hacks off the record that they concur with Crowdstrike and other private cybersecurity firms who have pointed to Russian culpability.

For some reason the US government has declined to publicly blame the Russians. In fact the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the audience at the Aspen Security Forum Thursday that the U.S. intelligence community was "not quite ready to make a call on attribution".

There is a remote possibility that a clever hacker or hacking team could be framing the Russians, but the question then who has a real motive. Trump’s own team lacks the smarts, and the opposable thumbs, to carry out an attack that is so clever that the NSA thinks it is the Russians. Besides if Trump had a choice he would not like the finger pointing at his oligarch mates.

Michael Buratowski, the senior vice president of cybersecurity services at Fidelis Cybersecurity which studied some of the malicious code, said the evidence pointing to the Russians was so convincing, "it would have had to have been a very elaborate scheme" for it really to have been anyone else.

The Tsar of all the Russias, Tsar Vladimir Putin is desperate to investigate the back doors of western software makers and has ordered them to grant access to his mighty spooks.

The Federal Security Service (FSB) plans to produce "encryption keys" which can decrypt all data on the internet, and given them two weeks to do it.

The head of the FSB, Alexander Bortnikov, is responsible for accomplishing such a task under new 'anti-terrorist' laws which require all 'organisers of information distribution' that add 'additional coding' to transmitted electronic messages to provide the FSB with any information necessary to decrypt those messages.

Basically, if you run encrypted software or hardware in Russia you will have to lubricate your back door to allow a spook to decrypt it. Many services and websites don't have "keys" or are fundamentally unsharable, like banks and financial institutions. Nearly all electronic information needs to be "encoded" in some way.

While it might just be that the order is a little silly, if not impossible, other aspects of the executive order show that Tsar Putin might not really have his finger on the internet pulse. He has ordered telecom providers and "organizers of information distribution" to store copies of the content of all information they transmit for six months and store the metadata for three years so the Kremlin can access it whenever they want.

However this means that ISPs would need to build new data centres capable of holding all that information and buy imported equipment, all without state subsidies. It would also mean that in two weeks the Russian government would need to upgrade Russia's outdated electrical grid and cables, which could cost between $30 and $77 billion so that such data centres could be run.

Bortnikov has two weeks to do all this so we are not sure quite what he will tell his boss when he can’t deliver. Our guess is that he will tell him that it has been done and hope Putin does not notice.

A security protocol designed and promoted by British spooks for encrypting voice calls has a by-design weakness built into it that could allow for mass surveillance.

University College London researcher Steven Murdoch, who works in the university's Information Security Research Group, analysed a protocol developed by CESG, which is part of the spy agency GCHQ.

MIKEY-SAKKE (Multimedia Internet KEYing-Sakai-KasaharaKey Encryption) protocol calls for a master decryption key to be held by a service provider, just like the spooks want. The only problem is that the existence of a master private key that can decrypt all calls past and present without detection, on a computer permanently available, creates a huge security risk, and an irresistible target for attackers.

Cryptography engineers normally want to avoid this idea, called "key escrow," as it makes whatever entity holding the key a target for attack. It also makes the data of users more vulnerable to legal action and secret court orders.

This appears to be a case of the British government eating its own crazy security dog food and suffering because of it. The governmentis worried about how encryption could inhibit law enforcement and impact terrorism-related investigations so it insisted on having a back door on its own government phone communications.

Murdoch wrote CESG is well aware of the implications of its design. Interestingly, the phrase "key escrow" and avoided mentioning it in the protocol's specification.

"This is presented as a feature rather than bug, with the motivating case in the GCHQ documentation being to allow companies to listen to their employees calls when investigating misconduct, such as in the financial industry," he wrote.

But this is going to cause a major headache for technology vendors. Murdoch wrote that the British government will only certify voice encryption products that use it.

"MIKEY-SAKKE has a monopoly over the vast majority of classified U.K. government voice communication, and so companies developing secure voice communication systems must implement it in order to gain access to this market," he wrote.

GCHA has already begun certifying products under its Commercial Product Assurance (CPA) security evaluation program. Approved products must use MIKEY-SAKKE and also Secure Chorus, an open-source code library that ensure interoperability between different devices.